Monday, 10 June 2013

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

THE BIGGEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME JUST GOT A LITTLE MAKEOVER.

Despite the huge hiatus I took from this already enormous
project, I think it should be pretty damn obvious at this point that movies
mean a lot to me. If they didn’t, I don’t think I’d be even remotely close to
the person I am today, let alone attempting to review every film I own one by
one on the Internet. I love movies, and so I especially like it when a film
comes out that so clearly comes from that same place in the filmmaker. Michel
Gondry is one of those filmmakers that can do this. Idiosyncratic, quirky,
absurd and possessed of a unique visual style, Gondry looked back to the films
of the past to tell a story of what they mean to people and how they can bring
them together through the acts of communal memory.

In Passaic, New Jersey, Elroy Fletcher (Danny Glover) runs a
video rental store in a condemned building he claims was the birthplace of jazz
legend Fats Waller. Facing foreclosure, Fletcher goes on a business venture,
leaving his foster son Mike (Mos Def) in charge of the store. However, when Mike’s
friend Jerry (Jack Black) tries to sabotage a nearby power station and becomes
magnetised, he inadvertently erases every tape in the store. Mike and Jerry
quickly hatch a plan to hide the disaster by making homemade versions of every
title to rent and save the store. With help from the local community, their
films develop a cult following.

When Gondry first talked to Jack Black about the project,
specifically the premise of two friends who accidentally erase all the tapes in
a video rental store and have to quickly make up new versions themselves, Black
assumed that it was to be a period piece, set in the 70s or 80s. Gondry
corrected him that it would be set today, that it would be a video rental store
that, now in a world of DVD players and digital playback, was now finally on
its way out. Right away, there is a rather wistful sadness to this idea. That
this store, its name of Be Kind Rewind now being something that's redundant in this modern
day, has held on for way longer than it really should have and is now on the
verge of collapse. This point is actually quite literally made, since the
entire building itself is due to be condemned, failing to meet some of the most
basic requirements for safety and public use. Progress is coming, whether they
want it or not.

The store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher, is clearly someone who
could never really hack it in a fast-paced world. Early in the film, whilst
having lunch with Mike and Jerry, they ask him why he was never married. He
answers, “Well, the common story is, the girl that you was gonna ask, you
waited too long to ask. She went on to marry somebody else and then you can’t
find anybody to compare to her. So, what happens? You get old.” And old itself
has a sort of double meaning here, too. Yes, Mr. Fletcher has indeed got old
and is now too far gone to catch up, but the force of progress that threatens
to oust him and end his business comes in the form of a neighbourhood
gentrification project, which plans to clean up the rundown area and rename it
Olde Passaic. Mr. Fletcher wants to keep his home and his business, but he
needs time to do it.

His foster son Mike (I say foster son, though I’m not really
entirely sure as to what the relationship actually is between the two, but it
seems the most likely) also wants to hold on to the old neighbourhood, as
opposed to the Olde neighbourhood, for a few reasons. Like Mr. Fletcher, he
wants to keep things the way they are. He wants Mr. Fletcher to be happy. And
he likes the neighbourhood, though when pressed he has kind of a tough time
giving reasons as to why. When he and Jerry argue about it, both have their
viewpoints on Passaic.

Jerry:
Mike, you have zero ambition.

Mike:
What?

Jerry: That’s your
problem. You’re gonna be stuck in this dump

for the rest of your life. Good
night.

Mike:
What? What? What’s a dump? What’s a dump? My shop

is a dump? You live in a
junkyard.

Jerry: Not just the store…
this whole city is a swamp.

Mike:
It’s a swamp now?

Jerry: Yeah, a dump swamp.
When you get stuck here, you’re

stuck for life. Come on, Mike,
what is so great about this town? Huh?

Mike:
… the people.

Jerry:
The people? You’re gonna make me cry. The people. The

only reason there’s anybody here
is because they have nowhere to go.

Perhaps Jerry’s less positive outlook can be forgiven. At
least Mike has reasons to hold some affection for his neighbourhood. He grew up
here, has something of a life, albeit not a particularly good one if we’re
honest. And he’s proud to have lived in the very building in which jazz great
Fats Waller was born. It’s the story that Mr. Fletcher has told him since he
was young, and is the story that we are told right at the start of the film,
that Harlem wasn’t the capital of the jazz scene back in the day; Passaic was.
How can you not want to hold on to such an important part of history when it’s
so close to you? That’s why he tries to paint a mural of Fats beneath an
overpass, to give the people of the neighbourhood something to look to and in
which they can take some level of pride.

However, with Jerry, he has comparatively even less than
Mike. Jerry does live in a junkyard, in a trailer, right next to a power
station. Worse still, he believes that microwaves from the power station are
causing his brains and the brains of everyone else to become affected, which is
all part of a government conspiracy to alter behaviour. To buy things, to
accept things… yeah, he’s a little strange. And people do dismiss him as the
paranoid oddball for his strangeness. The local cops even make something of a
joke of visiting his trailer in the night, taking turns knocking on his walls,
claiming to be from the government, that the black helicopters are here and
such… but Jerry has a plan: sabotage.

When Mr. Fletcher leaves town to go to a Fats Waller
remembrance ceremony, leaving Mike in charge, Jerry enlists Mike in his plan to
scale the fence of the power station and destroy it by swinging a grappling
hook onto it and……. well, that’s actually it. Jerry thinks that should be
enough to stop the microwaves from controlling everyone, somehow. Mike
initially declines, but goes along anyway (it’s kind of plot hole, but not a
particularly major one). However, halfway through the mission, Mike gets cold
feet about the plan and abandons Jerry and takes off. Jerry stays to follow
through, but in a moment that you’d think could only happen in films from the
80s, the power station fights back and sabotages Jerry.

The next morning, when Jerry visits the store to tell Mike
about the previous night, Jerry gets in an argument with a customer when he
keeps re-arranging all the tapes in the store. It’s not until a little later
that we find out that this is the moment when Jerry, having been magnetised by
the attempted sabotage, has inadvertently erased every single tape in the
store. After an initial period of worry, and under the threat that Mr. Fletcher
will be told how poorly Mike is coping, he has an idea. Grabbing a VHS camera
and the blank tape of Ghostbusters, he announces to Jerry, “I’m Bill Murray,
you’re everyone else.” They are going to personally remake every title in the
store, using themselves as cast and crew, from memory, thus keeping the store
in business.

Yes, the premise is bizarre as all hell, but don’t you just
love that? For the potential downer that Be Kind Rewind could become (the end
of VHS, for these people, for this neighbourhood), there is an absurd whimsy and warmth
about the whole thing that is incredibly charming. Instead of succumbing to the
inevitable, these two guys fight back, armed with a camera and some of the most
ridiculous props and costumes available. And as they go, their notoriety
escalates. They become so famous that people from all across the state come to
see what they’ve made, like their 20-minute version of Ghostbusters featuring a
ginger cat as Zuul and proton beams made of Christmas tinsel; their remake of
Boyz n’ the Hood in which gunshots result in a literal pizza on the ground
standing in for blood; or their take on RoboCop, where the titular character is
made entirely of autoyard scrap.

Not only do Mike and Jerry become moderately famous in the
city, but the community comes together to help them make more films,
effectively becoming an enormous production crew and repertory company.
Everyone bands together to make new versions of these films, but all in the uniquely
zero-budget way they called “Sweded”.

It’s in this nature of Sweding that we see some of the great
tricks of what is effectively guerrilla filmmaking, many of which Michel Gondry
used himself growing up. They utilise depth of field and perspective tricks to
create a sense of scale between a giant Jack Black-shaped King Kong and the
screaming woman he snatches through a window; they flip the camera to negative
in order to film night shots during the day; and they use cheap scale models
for scenes like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attacking New York. It’s such a
wonderful combination of crass cheapness and incredibly imaginative technique.
What’s even better are some of the titles they claim to have Sweded, either
from what is seen on shelves or are mentioned during filming montages. Return
of the King is one such title that would be absolutely hilarious to see as
rendered by three people using a budget of about $20 and filmed in New Jersey.
On the other end of the scale is mentioned a Sweded version of Harmony Korine’s
Gummo, which, if you’re familiar with that film, proposes an idea of such
absurdity since Gummo is as close to the real world equivalent of Sweding films
as it’s possible to get. (Harmony Korine even outdid that in 2009 when he
made Trash Humpers, a film made entirely on VHS and edited using two VCRs
instead of actual editing equipment.) There is even a shot in Be Kind Rewind of genuinely
impressive staging in which we are presented with a montage of the films being
made, but it is actually one single, uninterrupted shot, with everyone moving
from set-piece to set-piece, taking in films as diverse as King Kong, 2001: A
Space Odyssey, Men in Black and Carrie. It’s a great shot.

Eventually, things do start to catch up with the Be Kind
Rewind crew, with representatives of movie studios looking to enforce copyright
law showing up to end their business. It’s here once again that the idea of
progress, or at least a contrary sense of progress, seems to enter the film.
Even though what they are doing is a violation of copyright law, the films that
they make are helping them to progress and make some headway in saving their
business, and also fostering a sense of community. Indeed, what they are doing can be found on the Internet and in
most film schools, with students remaking scenes and sometimes whole movies in
order to develop and progress their skills as filmmakers (I once happened upon
a short piece of film on an edit suite in which some students were re-enacting a
scene from Twilight… it was pretty funny). And this idea of creativity being
derived, borrowed, flat-out stolen from what has gone before has been
acknowledged by some great innovators in the world of art. Pablo Picasso
famously said that, “good artists copy; great artists steal” and that, “every
act of creation is an act of destruction”. Indeed, the history of creating new
art or technology or science is a history of taking what has come before and
reworking it into something else, something new. That the studios go after the
Be Kind Rewind crew is as much an act of desperation that their product will be
devalued as it is the defence of intellectual property. In a weird way, Gondry's film that revolves around the anachronism of VHS being overtaken by the new technology of DVD, and those that fight to save it, finds its parallel in the studio executives (like those who try to shut down this small movement) who find themselves on the line of being ousted by the surge of independent filmmakers who rise thanks to the new media opportunities of the Internet and digital distribution... hell of a thing, that.

This idea of taking from the past and turning it into what
you want or need it to be is addressed directly in the film when, after the
visit from the studio reps ends their Sweding run, the community band together
for a last chance at saving the neighbourhood by making something new. It’s no
longer about the community banding together over the shared love of other
films. Now, it’s about keeping that community together by creating something
that speaks for them all. As Jerry says, “We can make any movie we want… they
can’t sue us if we’re making new ones.” And the story they choose is simple… a
history of Fats Waller’s life as lived in Passaic. They want to tell the story
of someone who Mr. Fletcher called “a happy man.”

Given that the film is as much as ode to community as it is
to film, Michel Gondry embraced the real community of Passaic as much as he
could. Some roles were given to real residents of the area. Pretty much every
extra you see was local to the area they were shooting. And the final shot that
assembles the community at large is a genuinely heart-warming sight. In making
a film about a community coming together, Gondry really did bring a community
together.

Be Kind Rewind may require you to screw on something of a
whimsical head at certain moments (if you can take Jerry’s attempted sabotage
of the power plant as the hilarious throwback that it is, you’ll be fine), but
it is a truly warm and charming film, with a deep affection for film, for music,
for people. Everyone is great, from Mos Def and Jack Black’s odd double act to
the delightful Melonie Diaz to the slightly spaced out kookiness of Mia Farrow.
In this film, Gondry has created something of sincerity and obvious love, and it
is most certainly worth the watch.